Sorry, but a bit of a pedantic note here: laser printers do not use dry ink. They don't use ink at all; they use "toner". Toner is really nothing more than microscopic particles of colored plastic. The printer uses electrostatic attraction to put the particles on a sheet of paper in a pattern, and then a "fuser" (a small heater) to melt the plastic so that it binds to the paper, without catching the paper on fire. So toner never goes bad because it's really nothing more than dust.
As for your B&W laser, it used to be that color lasers were horribly expensive so only companies had them. These days, color lasers have gotten pretty cheap, and aren't that much more than the B&W lasers. My Brother was about $200 IIRC. Of course, you can get a small B&W for under $100 now, but still, $200-300 is not budget-breaker for anyone in the IT industry. So even if you don't really need color that much, if you're in the market for a printer, I'd advise just spending the extra money and getting the color model, unless you really want your printer to be small (the color models are usually a lot larger, because of the separate toner cartridges).
I would never advise using an inkjet unless you really need to. They're a terrible deal financially; the only thing they're better at is costing less initially, but the consumables are very expensive and don't last long. They do make sense for some high-end high-volume applications, but those use more industrial-sized printers with continuous-flow ink, not small consumer printers with overpriced ink carts. Honestly, consumer inkjets are probably the biggest scam in all of computing history.
As for your B&W laser, it used to be that color lasers were horribly expensive so only companies had them. These days, color lasers have gotten pretty cheap, and aren't that much more than the B&W lasers. My Brother was about $200 IIRC. Of course, you can get a small B&W for under $100 now, but still, $200-300 is not budget-breaker for anyone in the IT industry. So even if you don't really need color that much, if you're in the market for a printer, I'd advise just spending the extra money and getting the color model, unless you really want your printer to be small (the color models are usually a lot larger, because of the separate toner cartridges).
I would never advise using an inkjet unless you really need to. They're a terrible deal financially; the only thing they're better at is costing less initially, but the consumables are very expensive and don't last long. They do make sense for some high-end high-volume applications, but those use more industrial-sized printers with continuous-flow ink, not small consumer printers with overpriced ink carts. Honestly, consumer inkjets are probably the biggest scam in all of computing history.